Posted on 03/14/2002 1:00:40 PM PST by T'wit
By Damien McElroy in Beijing
(Filed: 10/03/2002)
CHINA is being swept by a wave of revenge attacks by victims of a government scheme that infected hundreds of thousands of peasants with the Aids virus before abandoning them without medical care or compensation.
Major cities have been convulsed by fear as word has spread that innocent pedestrians are being attacked in the street by people with syringes said to contain HIV-tainted blood.
Anxious residents of Beijing and Tianjin, the two largest northern cities, have besieged hospital clinics, demanding blood tests after saying that they were stabbed in the street. The government imposed a news blackout for fear of fuelling further panic, especially in Tianjin, where 47 reported attacks have prompted workers to call in sick, led shoppers to stay at home and caused some people to flee the city.
Between 100,000 and 500,000 people from Henan province, in central China, are thought to have contracted the virus after selling blood in a scheme that used unsanitary methods.
Whole villages in the province have been plunged into a public-health crisis as up to 80 per cent of residents have been infected with HIV. They have since received little or no medical care. Some have travelled to the cities to draw attention to their plight.
The virus was spread after local authorities set up collection units that toured villages, buying blood and returning plasma to donors - a method that helps the body compensate for the loss of blood. Government agencies are said to have pooled plasma in vats before reinjecting it. Visitors to the area describe scenes composed of the living dead - victims developing Aids and enduring the fevers, sores, headaches, boils and consumptive coughs associated with it. On the streets, shuffling men and women in clothes that no longer fit stare at strangers with the hopeless look of the damned.
Many villagers now face a nightmarish existence of suffering without state medical care as they slip towards death.
The infections date back to the late 1990s, but victims have been growing bolder recently as they challenge the government for free medicine and financial compensation. Last month, their desperation spilled out of the backward uplands of Henan and on to the prosperous streets of China's big cities. Police say that the number of attacks has been growing.
"The Tianjin public security [police] bureau has ascertained that a small number of criminals with ulterior motives were responsible for recent attacks on citizens by people wielding syringes and sharp objects," said one officer.
Discos and cinemas have suffered a slump in custom as worried people stay home, while Tianjin's education officials have told schools to strengthen security.
24 August 2001: China in the grip of 'hidden Aids epidemic'
18 August 2001: Chinese Aids cover-up makes four-year-old a revolutionary
Buying and selling of tainted blood, (from prisons) was probably a tactic the Chinese copied from the CLINTON COOKBOOK.
The trail is difficult to follow, but there was testimony about tainted blood -- probably from U.S. prisons and processed in Canada -- blood so bad that nobody in the developed world would buy it. It was dumped in third world countries in Africa and Asia. That could possibly have been a source of the Chinese epidemic.
It certainly didn't help that the Chinese government denied for years that they had any AIDS cases.
Getting revenge on government bureaucrats.
You must realize that bureaucrats are above the law and blameless and really really really nice people, so if anyone resents a bureaucrat giving him a fatal disease, it's an "ulterior motive." Clear now?
This story is consistant with my beliefs of who the militant homsexuals are, and so, for what it's worth, I believe that this is happening.
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